The Savage City (14 page)

At a hearing, the chief asked Phillips and Delafranco, “What were you doing in the bar?”

“Making an inspection,” answered Phillips.

“Did you make out the UF88 form?”

“Sure.” To Phillips and Delafranco, it seemed like routine questioning. They explained to the chief that they never gave up anybody—that their friend the bar owner already knew that the two undercover investigators were with the Fag Squad. The hearing lasted ten minutes. Phillips left the room certain that everything was A-okay.

Three weeks later, he and Delafranco heard the verdict: they were being “flopped” out of the detective bureau and demoted to patrolmen.

Phillips was stunned. He went to the head of the Detectives Endowment Association, a kind of union for detectives, and pleaded his case. The president of the DEA said, “What have you ever done for me?” To Phillips, this was interesting; he'd spread money around to lots of people in the department, but you couldn't take care of everybody. No matter how many people got a slice, there was always somebody who didn't. Phillips had assumed that his years of payoffs were enough to protect him. Now he realized that, for every friend in the department, there was always someone else outside the loop, looking to even the score.

There was nothing Phillips could do: just like that he was back in uniform, patrolling the streets like a punk kid just out of the academy.

Phillips was essentially an optimist, always on the lookout for a silver lining. And there it was: he was assigned to the Twenty-fifth Precinct in Harlem, nirvana for a cop on the take.

Phillips knew, from his father and from NYPD lore, that there was nowhere in the city where dirty money flowed quite like Harlem. All kinds of illegal activities were going on there, and the police were in on all of it: numbers, gambling, after-hours clubs, burglary rings, fences, loan sharks, prostitution, and narcotics. Phillips steered clear of prostitution and drugs; he was old-fashioned that way. The skells in the prostitution business were untrustworthy. And narcotics, well, that was a brave new world. Narcotics was O.C., organized crime. Dabble in narcotics and sooner or later you were going to wind up with dead cops. Phillips didn't want that on his conscience. And in Harlem you didn't need prostitution and dope to get rich; there was plenty of money to be made elsewhere.

Phillips wasn't thrilled about the idea of spending all that time in Harlem. He didn't like black people; he was a self-proclaimed bigot. But a man had to weigh his prejudices against his opportunities. And for a hustler like Phillips, Harlem was a land of opportunity, a New Frontier.

Maybe he could salvage this, Phillips thought. Maybe Harlem would be his salvation.

It was a forty-minute drive from Phillips's Elmhurst home to the Twenty-fifth Precinct station house on East 119th Street near Park Avenue. In East Harlem, Phillips drove past dilapidated tenements, debris, and human refuse, a reminder that he was no longer cruising the streets of midtown.

Landing in a new precinct is always an adjustment. Phillips dropped fifteen dollars each on everyone he was supposed to, but he was still getting bad assignments. This made him angry.

Eventually, Phillips got transferred from a foot patrol to a sector car, which was a big step up. The catch was that he was given a black partner, Egbert Brown, a young cop with only two years on the job. “Most white policemen didn't want to work with blacks,” remembered Phillips. But he saw the advantage in having a black partner in Harlem—and having a young partner meant Phillips called the shots.

Bert Brown was medium height, mocha-skinned, and he was a good talker. He also had contacts in the neighborhood. Within weeks, Phillips and Brown had established a network of patrolmen working for them as bagmen, picking up two and three dollars a day from street peddlers, two and three dollars from bodega owners, and even more from traffic violators. Phillips and his partner were taking in three and four hundred a month.

Through it all, Phillips regaled Brown with stories of his big scores while in the Detective Bureau. “I got a lot of friends in the bureau,” he told Brown. “Stick with me, kid, and you'll be in plainclothes in a year.”

“Hey,” asked Brown, “you think you could make some friendly phone calls for me? Smooth the waters?”

Phillips said he would, but he never did.

The last straw for Phillips was when he heard that the ungrateful bastard was actually skimming on the side. Phillips found out about it while he was preparing to leave for two weeks' vacation. For a cop on the take, vacations can be a perilous time. Without the cop around to make regular pickups, poachers can move in and mess up a good thing. Phillips told Brown to handle the pickups from gamblers and policy men in his absence. When he returned, he asked his partner how it went.

“Good,” Brown said. “I picked up some, but not all.”

Phillips was suspicious. He went to one of his regular spots, a weekly dice, craps, and card location in East Harlem run by a wiseguy called Louis Fats.

“Hey, Louis,” he said. “How you been? I come to pick up the thing for last month. I was on vacation.”

“The nigger got it,” said Louis.

“He got it?”

“Yeah.”

Phillips couldn't believe it: he was being ripped off by a raw-assed rookie, and a nigger to boot. Phillips started setting up his own pads, cutting Brown out of the picture. “I make an extra seventy, eighty dollars a month. Every time I picked up the money I'd go, ha-ha, you fuck, and put it in my pocket.”

Egbert Brown did eventually get transferred to plainclothes. Phillips was glad to see him go.

Phillips went to the roll call man and slipped him fifteen dollars. “No more nigger partners,” he said. “I'd rather walk the street. You put me in with another black guy, put me out of the car. I will never again work with another one of those black bastards. They can't be trusted.”

GEORGE WHITMORE WAS
feeling apprehensive. In preparation for his trial, he'd been transferred temporarily to the psych ward at Kings County Hospital. Located on Atlantic Avenue in the heart of Brooklyn, Kings County housed some true crazies—killers, child molesters, dope fiends, and droolers. In his small corner of the ward, Whitmore had plenty of time to stare at the ceiling and ponder his fate. Years later, he remembered:

Whitmore's attorney was on the case. Working out of his Court Street office in downtown Brooklyn, Jerome Leftow set his sights on the Elba Borrero case. His client was charged with one count of attempted
rape and one count of assault. Another public defender might have focused on the issue of racial injustice, tried to make something of Whitmore's situation in the press, but Leftow was no crusader. He was a clubhouse lawyer, and he was determined to fight the charges on their merits, with little speculation, pretrial shenanigans, or racial posturing in the press.

Without the sensational Wylie-Hoffert charges attached, the press wasn't too interested anyway. Whitmore was a black man being tried for assaulting a Puerto Rican woman—a crime among minorities on a Brooklyn street, the kind that rarely made the papers or the TV news. The system was filled with cases like this, and they usually went the same way: in the interest of expediency, a plea bargain would be arranged by the prosecutor, judge, and public defender, and the defendant would be implored to take the deal. Whitmore was offered a deal on the Borrero case, assured he'd receive minimal jail time if he pleaded guilty. To which George said, “Why would I plead guilty to somethin' I didn't do?”

Leftow was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of charges hanging over Whitmore's head—Borrero, Edmonds, Wylie-Hoffert—but he had good feelings about the Borrero charges. As far as he could tell, the D.A.'s case had many holes.

For one thing, Leftow had his doubts about whether an attempted rape had even occurred in Brownsville on the night in question. When the incident involving Elba Borrero had first been reported over the NYPD communication system, it was called a purse snatching, plain and simple. In Patrolman Isola's notebook entry, there was no mention of attempted rape or murder. The sexual dimensions of the case seemed to have been grafted on at a later date. Leftow suspected that the detectives invented the idea of an attempted rape after they decided to link Whitmore to the Wylie-Hoffert case, because it would help them establish a pattern. According to the official police accounts, in all three of Whitmore's cases he was alleged to have said, “I want to rape you, I want to kill you.” Rape and murder, murder and rape: For the prosecutors it was essential to suggest that these attacks were all part of a consistent pattern of criminal behavior.

Then there was Elba Borrero's identification of the suspect. Borrero had first described her attacker as a black male, twenty to twenty-five years old, five foot seven and one hundred sixty-five pounds, wearing a hat and a long leather coat. George Whitmore, on the other hand,
was a young-looking nineteen, five foot five, and one hundred forty at most. The police had confiscated a leather coat of Whitmore's at his girlfriend's house, but George said he wasn't even wearing the coat on the night in question. His brother Shelley had been wearing the coat.

Finally, there was the manner by which Borrero had identified George as the assailant: through a peephole, with no other suspects around. Even then, she had been uncertain at first. Normally, police were required to set up a lineup, or at least show the victim a set of photos and ask the person to identify one suspect among many faces.

These and additional evidentiary matters encouraged Leftow to believe he could establish that great life preserver for all public defenders: reasonable doubt. He wasn't exactly brimming with confidence as the trial approached, but he wasn't despairing either. He put his chances at fifty-fifty.

Early on the morning of November 9, 1964, Whitmore was transported from Kings County psych ward to the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn. It was his first public appearance in the nearly seven months since he had been arrested. The institutional routine of three meals a day, and a bed to sleep in, had been good for him: he had filled out a bit, and his acne, a consequence of poor nutrition, had cleared up. His hair had been trimmed, and he'd been given a bulky yellow sweater to wear. Yet none of this altered what was apparent when Whitmore opened his mouth—that he was clearly a child of the streets, with little education or sophistication.

Two days later, they had a jury: twelve white men from middle-class backgrounds. Leftow could have objected to the racial imbalance of the jury, but that wasn't his style. He was inured to the irrefutable nature of white courts, white juries, white justice.

On the first day of testimony, Elba Borrero was called to the stand. She was short and heavyset and wore a green print dress. She was only twenty-five, but with her horn-rimmed glasses and orthopedic shoes she looked ten years older. The prosecutor, Sidney A. Lichtman, led her through a series of questions to establish her story. On the night of the attempted rape, Borrero said, she was coming home from her job as a nurses' assistant at a nearby hospital. Dressed in her white uniform, carrying a purse with a shoulder strap, she descended the stairs of the IRT station and turned onto Bristol Street. It was nearly one in the morning, rainy and dark. This seven-minute walk from the subway to her apart
ment was Borrero's least favorite time, and that night her worst fears were realized: a man followed her from the subway station, the sound of his footsteps causing her to pick up the pace and hurry along.

Sid Lichtman was a seasoned veteran. In his early fifties, gray-haired and workmanlike, he posed each question as if it were one small piece of a larger puzzle. He also knew how to elicit sympathy from a jury, pausing so that Elba Borrero could lift her spectacles and dab her eyes as she cried on the stand. Pointing to a diagram of the location where the attack took place, Lichtman asked Borrero, “Did there come a time when you were assaulted on Bristol Street?”

“When he got to about here,” said Borrero, pointing to a spot on the diagram, “he pushed me against the wall. He was standing in front of me, and he said, ‘Let me touch your pussy.' And then he put his hand under my coat and under my uniform and under the slip and touched my pubic area.”

“By your pubic area, you mean what?”

“The vagina.”

“What was the exact language?”

“‘I want to have intercourse with you. I want to have sexual relations.' Then he said, ‘I'm going to rape you…. I'm going to kill you first and then rape you.' I grabbed ahold of his hands then, and his coat, and I started screaming…. I saw a flashlight come in…. Then he started to run.” Officer Isola had arrived on the scene. The assailant ran, the cop fired shots, and Elba Borrero breathed a sigh of relief.

The witness was asked to identify a button she claimed to have torn off the assailant's coat during the tussle. “Yes,” she said, “that's the button from the coat.”

Lichtman paused for dramatic effect, then asked, “Now, Mrs. Borrero, do you see the man who followed you and the man who attacked you that night? Do you see him in the courtroom this morning?”

“Yes,” she answered. “That's him right there.” She pointed at George Whitmore.

Under cross-examination by Leftow, Borrero maintained that she got a good look at her attacker, even though her descriptions of the assailant changed from the initial police report to the version she gave in court. Leftow asked Borrero how it was that she arrived at the Seventy-third Precinct two days after the assault.

“Patrolman Isola told me they had a man there they wanted me to
look at and identify and see if he had been the man who attacked me.”

“So when you looked through the peephole you knew the purpose was to see if you could identify the man on the opposite side of the room?”

“Yes.”

“And when you looked at the man, you said, ‘I'm not sure.' Is that correct?”

Prosecutor Lichtman stood to object, but Justice David Malbin raised his hand and said, “Wait a minute. Let her answer. Did you say you weren't sure?”

Borrero turned to Judge Malbin. “No, not exactly. I told Patrolman Isola, ‘This is the man.' And then I asked him to wait a minute…. I asked to have him speak.”

“Because you weren't sure,” interjected Leftow.

“No,” she answered. “Because I wanted to be sure beyond any shadow of a doubt.”

Leftow did not force the issue. He could see that Borrero had been well coached. The more he challenged her, the more adamant she became. Leftow had serious doubts about her identification, but he also knew that, to the jury, this woman was the victim of a frightening attack. If he came off as too aggressive in trying to discredit her, it could backfire, and her testimony would do even more damage than it already had.

Even so, he couldn't let Borrero leave the stand without bringing up the fact that, in the weeks before the trial, she had consulted with an attorney about collecting the ten-thousand-dollar reward offered by
Newsweek
in the Wylie-Hoffert case. The accusation was particularly damning because Borrero had claimed that she'd never even heard of the Wylie-Hoffert murders.

Asked Leftow, “Do you have any other interest but of a witness in this particular case?”

“No,” said Borrero.

Leftow then asked her about the ten thousand dollars.

“Do I have to answer that?” Borrero asked Judge Malbin.

“Just answer the question,” he said.

Borrero admitted that she had inquired about the reward.

“No further questions,” said Leftow.

Late in the afternoon, the jury was removed from the courtroom. An important moment in the trial had arrived: Justice Malbin was
required to determine—outside the purview of the jury—whether or not Whitmore's confession had been extracted “under duress.” If the judge determined that the confession had been coerced, it would be thrown out, and the proceedings would continue without any mention of Whitmore's signed statement. The judge's ruling was crucial since it would establish a legal precedent that could affect all of Whitmore's future cases and trials.

Patrolman Isola, Detective Aidala, and Detective Di Prima all took the stand. They were questioned by the judge about the circumstances surrounding the Whitmore confession. Then George Whitmore himself was called to testify.

To Whitmore, his arrival on the witness stand represented yet another immersion into a strange and intimidating universe: his journey from a street corner in Brownsville had led him through a police precinct, an arraignment court, two psychiatric hospitals, county jail, and now the halls of justice. The courts, in particular, were a world populated by white faces, educated people who spoke a language of legal jargon George could barely understand. Whitmore was nervous as he took the stand, but he was determined to describe the injustice that had been done to him. Once the judge heard the circumstances of his arrest and interrogation, he was certain, this charade would be over.

Whitmore's first experience as a witness did not go well. His nervousness read as defensiveness, especially when he was cross-examined by Sidney Lichtman. Said George, “[The policemen] called me a liar. Every time I told them I didn't do it, well, they hit me.”

Judge Malbin asked, “Who hit you?”

Whitmore pointed at Isola and Aidala, who were seated in the front row. “They struck me in the stomach, the chest, and the back.”

“On the face?” asked Lichtman.

“No…. They stood me in front of a chair…every time I said I didn't know what happened, I got knocked into the chair. Then they stood me up aside this wall and I continuously got beat until I could take it no more. So I just broke down and shook my head.”

Lichtman paused, sensing that the fate of his prosecution depended on the next series of questions. “What did he [Aidala] hit you with?” he asked.

George answered, “His fist…in my stomach.”

“How many times?”

Whitmore took a few seconds to think about it.

“How many times?” the prosecutor repeated.

“I haven't counted them.”

“More than ten times?”

“Yes. It was several times.”

“Ten times?”

“I don't know. I'm not sure how many times it was.”

“Were they hard blows?”

“Well, I had pains in my stomach.”

“Did you vomit?”

“No.”

“Patrolman Isola would punch you in the stomach and Detective Aidala would punch you in the back?” Lichtman swung a few roundhouse punches to illustrate his point.

“It wasn't like that. It was fast.”

“Altogether, how many times…about fifty punches from Detective Aidala?”

“Yes…and they weren't light.”

“How many punches did you get from Patrolman Isola?”

“I don't know…I was being hit at the same time. How am I supposed to count?”

“Between ten and twenty?”

“Yes.”

Seated at the defense table, Leftow winced. Whatever you do, he had told George, don't guess. Don't get suckered by the prosecutor. George had played right into Lichtman's hands. If he'd been beaten seventy times, he would have had to be carried out of the precinct on a gurney. Yet he'd already testified that, after this beating, he had sat down and eaten, drank coffee, and smoked a cigarette with these same policemen. Photographs of his body taken the next day by the Brooklyn D.A.'s office revealed no noticeable marks or bruises.